Mobile device management is a fully commoditized market. In the strictest definition of MDM, the available functionality is limited to those application programmer interfaces that are made available by the operating system vendor (Google or Apple). There is very little that traditional MDM offerings can do to differentiate themselves from the other 100+ vendors in the market. This causes significant price pressure on the offerings. Value for MDM is rapidly approaching zero. As we have seen over the past year-and-a-half, core MDM component offerings have been continuously lowering their prices in an attempt to maintain market share. There is a transition by the major MDM players to expand well beyond the traditional "wipe," "lock," and "locate" concepts available to them into more advanced technologies such as content and collaboration systems, security components at the network and application layer, as well as partnerships and integrations with secondary market offerings. These features have value. MDM at its core does not.

I think it's about time someone came out and said it. Just like Dobby from the Harry Potter books, MDM should be free. I've been telling all of the vendors that I work with that if they don't put out their MDM offering in a freemium model very shortly, the other vendors will beat them to the punch. Traditional MDM offerings are a land grab for enterprise market share and should be used as an upsell or wedge into more advanced and differentiable offerings. I predict that in the next 6 to 9 months we will see most, if not all, of the leading MDM vendors giving away their core functionality.

Due to the immense downward price pressure, enterprise buyers have all the negotiating power. Request that your vendor give you the fundamental MDM component offerings for free and spend your time negotiating the cost of the add-on features like security and content collaboration suites. They may not have the technical or business capability to live up to this request today, but they will soon. If they don't... you can always go somewhere else.

I love the Malfoys line. I'm not convinced on custom ROMs. I'd have to see some evidence that it's not too much of a technical hurdle to be effective. I'm also not convinced on the rise of $MSFT. I think they will get to 10% market share over time at best. It's going to be fun to watch this unfold. All bets in this comment are OPINIONS. :)